Free AOL Stuff, Courtesy of Bubble 2.0

Yes, it’s 1999 all over again. Web start-ups are cropping up with names like Bebo, Squidoo and Moblabber. Start-ups like YouTube, less than a year old and unprofitable, are being sold for $1.65 billion. And the business plan known as Free has returned. You know, “We lose money on every transaction, but we’ll make it up in volume.”

One of the most surprising participants in Web Bubble 2.0 is AOL, the company formerly known as America Online. On Aug. 2, it announced what might seem to be the craziest business plan yet: a 100 percent price reduction. The monthly membership fee dropped from $26 a month to ... nothing.

Was AOL nuts? Should its executives be dragged away by the nice men in white coats?

It turns out that only AOL’s features, sites and services are free, not the Internet connections that were once its bread and butter. AOL had been losing members at a staggering rate, with 300,000 people a month canceling their AOL accounts as they switched to high-speed Internet from their cable and phone companies. AOL now has fewer than 18 million members, down from 35 million in 2002.

So AOL decided to get out of the Internet service-provider game, a dead-end business for a company that doesn’t actually own the wires running to your home.

First, abandoning its efforts to sign up subscribers will save hundreds of millions of dollars a year right off the bat. You read that right: AOL has stopped carpet-bombing the nation’s mailboxes with AOL starter discs. No more “Sign up now!” TV ads, either.

And then there are those ads on AOL itself. Since it went free, AOL has lost 2.5 million paying subscribers — but gained 3 million free members. That’s more people looking at the ads, which AOL figures will attract even more advertisers.

All right, so much for AOL’s interests. What’s in it for you?

Truth is, AOL looks a lot like Yahoo these days: It’s a portal to e-mail, chat rooms, news, classifieds, personal ads and discussion areas. There’s a Flickr-type thing (post photos for friends to see — and order prints), a Google Video-type thing (post homemade videos or buy network TV episodes), a Weather.com-type thing, and so on. There’s also a Google-esque search service that’s powered by Google itself.

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Illustration by Stuart Goldenberg

Most of AOL’s goodies are available from any Web browser (www.aol.com is the home page). In other words, you don’t need to sign up for anything, and you don’t need the old AOL client software — you know, the all-inclusive Internet dashboard that greets you with “Welcome! You’ve got mail!” (The client software is still available if you want it.)

But even in its free version, AOL is not for everyone. AOL’s “sanitized for your protection” approach still doesn’t appeal to the technically proficient. One member of Digg.com, the techie news service, complaining about AOL’s “ad-infested” pages, suggested that AOL “should reverse their model entirely, and pay us to browse.”

Take this simple test: Do you know how to find your I.P. address, subscribe to R.S.S. feeds or know what “FWIW” stands for? If so, you’ll probably find AOL too mass-market for your tastes.

Still, a few AOL goodies, once reserved for paying members, are especially attractive now. For example:

PARENTAL CONTROLS AOL remains one of the most effective front doors to the Internet for households with children. You can specify which Web pages and chat or e-mail partners are off-limits, or let AOL do the blocking for you. You can limit your child’s time online, by quantity or times of day. AOL can send you daily activity reports about your offspring by e-mail. AOL even adjusts the screen design and features according to your child’s age.

A free add-on program for Windows called Internet Access Controls even stops enterprising young hackers from bypassing the parental controls by using other browsers and chat programs.

XM RADIO AOL offers a couple of hundred free Internet radio stations (aolradio.com) — nothing exclusive there. But 20 of them are commercial-free music channels from XM satellite radio. The audio and programming quality are very high; the 20 free channels include some of XM’s best.

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OPENRIDE If you have broadband, you’re encouraged to download a new AOL dashboard called OpenRide (Windows XP only) instead of the aging Mac or Windows client software. Unlike the old software, which cluttered your screen with windows, OpenRide offers all of AOL in a single window.

It’s divided into quadrants, dedicated to the Web, chat, video and audio, and e-mail (for both AOL mail and your other e-mail accounts). You can drag the intersection of the panes to resize all four panes at once, or click inside a pane to make it fill most of your window. The other three shrink down to little tabs.

The geek intelligentsia spit upon OpenRide, too, partly because of the banner ad across the window and partly because its individual components aren’t as complete as stand-alone programs. For example, OpenRide doesn’t offer R.S.S. news feeds (self-updating lists of headlines from news sites and blogs of your choosing).

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An AOL desktop program called OpenRide is divided into quadrants for Web, chat, video and audio, and e-mail. The windows can be resized.

But the truth is, the four-pane approach really works. That, and OpenRide’s tabbed browser design, keep novices from getting lost on the Internet.

ONLINE BACKUP All free AOL account holders get five gigabytes of free online storage for backing up data, transferring big files to other people, and so on. Windows users even get a free backup program that automatically copies selected folders to this virtual hard drive (called Xdrive) on a schedule. The software is clean, easy to use and extremely convenient.

ANTIVIRUS SOFTWARE AOL’s free security suite for Windows offers both real-time virus protection and virus scanning (it’s based on McAfee’s software). The suite also includes protection against spyware, pop-up windows, phishing scams and spam. Commercial security suites cost $50 or $70 a year. So if you don’t mind seeing a banner ad even in your virus software, this is quite a deal.

A CUSTOM E-MAIL ADDRESS AOL lets you choose an address ending in @aol.com or anything else you want, as long as it’s available — so you can be david@thepogues.com or david@poguefamily.com. Then you can set up other addresses with the same suffix for friends or family. (To enforce its “one custom address per person” policy, AOL requires that you sign up using a cellphone number. It insists that it does nothing else with this information.)

There aren’t many advantages to signing up for a free AOL account (as opposed to just using its features anonymously), but the AOL or custom e-mail address is one of them. The others include unlimited online photo storage and the option to use the AOL client software or OpenRide.

AOL still sells subscriptions, by the way, for $10 or $26 a month. Such memberships grant you dial-up access, 50 more XM radio stations, unlimited e-mail storage (versus 2 gigabytes for freeloaders), a 50-gig Xdrive, identity-theft and PC-malfunction insurance, and so on.

But even the free AOL has a lot to offer. If you’re a parent or a technophobe, AOL is still one of the easiest, safest Internet on-ramps. And even if you’re an experienced Netizen, you should help yourself to the free antivirus software, or at least a custom e-mail address and a few satellite radio channels to listen to as you work. AOL’s video search, meanwhile, is one of the Web’s best; it finds video clips from all over the Web, including YouTube.

If you’re already an AOL member, you can switch to a free or less expensive plan at AOL keyword “Change Plan.” You don’t have to give up your AOL e-mail address; in fact, if you quit AOL within the last two years, you can still get your old address back.

But if you plan to switch, do it soon. If the last tech bubble taught us anything, it’s that freebies like these don’t last forever.

E-mail: pogue@nytimes.com

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: Free AOL Stuff, Courtesy Of Bubble 2.0. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe